Breedlove Guitars

Breedlove began in 1990, when Larry Breedlove and Steve Henderson — both fresh from Taylor Guitars — set up in Tumalo, Oregon to build custom fingerstyle six- and twelve-strings. From the start the brand was willing to rethink the acoustic's received shapes, and that streak deepened in 1994 when Larry's brother Kim Breedlove, a banjo maker and marquetry artist, joined as master luthier and spent the better part of the next 25 years steering the company's voice and look. The work has been based in Bend, Oregon since the company consolidated into a larger Central Oregon facility, and Bend remains where the guitars the Atlas tracks are built. What ties Breedlove's best work together is the idea they call Sound Optimization: the build "starts at the tree" and carries through to the player. In practice that means accounting for the specific density of each individual wood set, separating the resonant frequencies of top and back so they don't fight one another, and hand-voicing the pair — thinning and tuning the plates and bracing — so the finished instrument behaves as one tuned system. The signature Breedlove silhouettes, with their soft asymmetry and often a Pinless bridge and offset soundhole, grew out of the same instinct to treat the acoustic guitar as something to be engineered toward a sound rather than copied from a template. The Atlas focuses on the tier where that philosophy is taken furthest — the Bend-built, hand-voiced instruments: Masterclass (now reserved for Custom Shop and limited builds), the Legacy line introduced in 2014 as the top production series, Premier, and bespoke Custom work, frequently in exotic tonewoods such as Adirondack spruce, cocobolo, koa and sinker redwood. These are the Breedloves that sit alongside the rest of the boutique field, built one voiced set at a time in Oregon.